Shakespearean Poetry/Shakespearean Sonnets/ Shakespeare's Long narrative poems

                                             Anushua Chatterjee

Shakespeare's Sonnets 

 William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets were included in the volume Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 in a Quarto. These sonnets were followed by the long poem 'A Lover's Complaint', which first appeared in that same volume after the sonnets. Thomas Thorpe also entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609. Sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim. Apart from that, six additional sonnets appear in his plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost.There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.

Form : Shakespearean sonnet is popularly known as the English sonnet as it deviates from the Petrarchan, also synonymous with Italian sonnets that traditionally divides its 14 lines into Octave and Sestet, where Octave raises a particular problem and Sestet seeks the resolution. This model was followed by Wyatt and many other contemporary sonneteers. But Shakespeare followed the model of Earl of Surrey with a few exceptions. Structurally, the fourteen lines of Shakespearean sonnets are divided into three quatrains and a concluding couplet; the three quatrains put arguments and counter arguments and the couplet sums up the discussions.often the volta or the mood of the sonnet shifts at the end of the third quatrain. The sonnets were usually composed in iambic pentameter with a rhyming scheme of ababcdcd efef gg. 

Exceptions: Some sonnets do stand apart as being exceptional from the usual form in Shakespearean sonnets. For instance, 

Sonnet 99, “The forward violet thus did I chide” has fifteen lines which is unique as far as the standardized 14 lines structure of a sonnet is concerned. 

Again, in Sonnet 126, “O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy pow’r” , consists of six couplets, instead of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, and at the end of the sonnet two blank lines are marked with italic brackets. 

Sonnet 145, “Those lips that Love’s own hand did make” is written in Iambic tetrameters, instead of the conventional pentameters. 

Content : 

Thematically, Shakespeare broke away from the Petrarchan tradition of the deification of an unattainable lady love and man's corresponding wretchedness before the onslaught of Time. Instead, his poetic mind fabricated “a dark lady” whose complexion is ‘dun’, her breath "reeks", and she is quite unmajestic in her walks. Whereas the Petrarchan model was eulogizing in tone and presents the lovers in a mould of a Deity- devotee, the dark lady in Shakespearean sonnets, presents an adequate receptor for male desire. 

Apart from that, Shakespeare introduced the theme of Friendship ( to a certain point of homoeroticism) along with the Petrarchan themes of Time & Love. 

Instead of the beloved, the fair youth and his friendship is held in high esteem. He is portrayed as handsome, self-centered, universally admired and much sought after. 

In Petrarchan tradition, nature's permanence is juxtaposed with the transience of human life, love and fortune. But Shakespeare glorified his fair youth for his consistent beauty and virtue pointing out the “ nature's changing course”, i. e, in Shakespearean Sonnet human love and virtue is constant. 

Among the 154 sonnets, sonnet no. 1-126 are dedicated to “ a fair youth”, sonnet 127-152 to “ a dark lady” and the final two are allegorical in treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid. Among the first 126 sonnets, generally known as Fair Youth sonnets, sonnets 1-17 are called the Procreation Sonnets in which the poet urges the fair friend to marry and beget his children and through them immortalize his beauty as well as his virtues. Even in Sonnet 18, “Shall I Compare Thee” , the same thought is probably delivered in the expression “ When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” , though it may also denote the eternal verse that eternize the fair youth. 

In Sonnets 133,134 & 144 a tone of betrayal is put forward as the young man is seduced by the Dark Lady, and they maintain a liaison all of which the poet struggles to abide by. But, It concludes with the poet's own act of betrayal, resulting in his independence from the fair youth in sonnet 152.

“Dark lady”, “Fair Youth”, Mr. W. H. and The Rival Poet : 

The identity of the Fair Youth, Dark lady, Mr. W. H and the Rival Poet, has been the subject of much speculation among scholars.

The Dark Lady : The names of Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier, Elizabeth Wriothesley, Lucy Negro,and others have been suggested as the possibility of being the dark lady. 

Mary Fitton was an Elizabethan gentlewoman and later, became a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. She is noted for her scandalous affairs with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, a strong contender for the identity of fair youth. 

Emilia Lanier was an English poet and the first woman in England to assert herself as a professional poet. Her name has been conjectured on two grounds. First, Shakespeare's picture of a woman playing the virginal in Sonnet 128, resonates with her as she belongs to a family of Court musicians. Secondly, Shakespeare claims that the woman was "forsworn" in Sonnet 152, which has been speculated to refer to Lanier's relations with Shakespeare's patron, Lord Hunsdon.

Elizabeth Wriothesley was a waiting lady to Queen Elizabeth I and was married to the Earl of Southampton. Her alleged affair with Shakespeare has been the reason to assume her as the dark lady. Though she is also said to have influenced the character Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

Fair Youth : It is often conjectured that Shakespeare probably had in mind Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, to portray the fair youth, as his physical features, age, and personality quite fairly match the fair youth in the sonnets. He was both an admirer and patron of Shakespeare and was considered one of the most prominent nobles of the period, to whom Shakespeare's 1593 poem Venus and Adonis was dedicated. 

Authors such as Thomas Tyrwhitt and Oscar Wilde proposed the name of William Hughes, a seductive young actor who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays, to be the fair youth. 

Mr. W. H : About the identity of Mr. W. H, the only begetter of Shakespeare's Sonnets", a few names were speculated. For instance, William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, is seen as perhaps the most likely identity of Mr. W.H. and the "young man". He was also the dedicatee of the First Folio. Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton), with initials reversed, is also a likely possibility. He was the dedicatee of Shakespeare's poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The 18th-century scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt proposed the name of William Hughes, a young actor who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays.This idea is also strengthened by Oscar Wilde, in his short story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.".  

The Rival Poet : John Davies of Hereford, Samuel Daniel, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson are usually considered as candidates for the Rival Poet as they find support among clues in the sonnets. 

 "A Lover's Complaint”: A Lover's Complaint is composed of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal. This poem is said to have been written as an example of a normal feature of the two-part poetic form, in which the first part expresses the male point of view, and the second part contrasts or complements the first part with the female's point of view. The first part of the quarto, the 154 sonnets, considers frustrated male desire, and the second part, "A Lover's Complaint", expresses the misery of a woman victimized by male desire. This poem begins with a young woman weeping at the edge of a river, into which she throws torn-up letters, rings, and other tokens of love. When she is approached by an old man who asks the reason for her sorrow, she tells him of a former lover who pursued, seduced, and finally abandoned her. She concludes her story by conceding that she would fall for the young man's false charms again. 

The earliest examples of such two- part structure includes Samuel Daniel's Delia. 

Long poems/ Narrative poems of Shakespeare

Venus and Adonis(1593)

It was Shakespeare's first-published work, modelled after the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

Form : Structurally, it is written in stanzas of six lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABCC; although this verse form was known before Shakespeare's use, it is now commonly known as the Venus and Adonis stanza, after this poem. This form was also used by Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge. This poem consists of 199 stanzas having 1,194 lines.

Content : This poem is a re-telling of the classical myth: Venus, the goddess of love, falls for a young mortal and tries to woo Adonis and forces a rally of kisses upon him, boasts about her charms yet fails to win.At the end Adonis dies after being attacked by a wild boar. His body melts away leaving behind a flower which then Venus wears in her bosom. Shakespeare interprets the myth comically as well as tragically, for Adonis continually resists Venus's desire. The poem is considered an experiment in delicate eroticism and Andrew Sanders considers that the poem contrasts a passive male sexuality with an active female one. 

Dedication : The poem begins with a brief dedication to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, in which the poet describes the poem as "the first heir of my invention".

Adaptations: In 1992, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes’ book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is based on a "shamanic" interpretation of Venus and Adonis as a "key" to Shakespeare's tragic dramas. 

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) 

Publication: The Rape of Lucrece was entered into the Stationers' Register on 9 May 1594, and published later that year, in a quarto printed by Richard Field. 

Dedication : The poem begins with a prose dedication addressed directly to the Earl of Southampton. 

Setting : In "The Argument", a prose paragraph that summarizes the historical context of the poem, which begins in medias res (at the middle of the story). The poem is set just before the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. The poem's locations are Rome, Ardea, and Collatium. 

Form : The poem contains 1,855 lines, divided into 265 stanzas of seven lines each. The meter of each line is iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is ABABBCC, a format known as "rhyme royal". 

Content : This long poem, based on both Ovid's Fasti and Livy's History of Rome, and perhaps Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women but is more serious, and based on history rather than myth. The story is the rape of Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, by Tarquinius Sextus, son of the Roman king Tarquinius Superbus. Devastated and filled with shame, she tells her father and husband about the rape and asks for vengeance and eventually stabs herself to death. The poem comments on the problems of masculine violence and institutionalized attitudes towards feminine chastity.

Allusions to Lucretia in following Shakespearean plays: 

Titus Andronicus

The Taming of the Shrew

Twelfth Night

Macbeth

Cymbeline

The Phoenix and Turtle

Another of Shakespeare's poems 'The Phoenix and Turtle’, his only occasional poem, was commissioned to be included in a collection by Robert Chester called Love's Martyr (1601). 

Form : The poem is divided into three principal sections. The first five stanzas may be called the “session,” or sitting, a word from the poem itself that describes the assembling of the birds to sing the second section, called the “anthem,” or song. This second section, of eight stanzas, celebrates the love of the phoenix and turtle in a series of paradoxes, or apparent contradictions, that sometimes use philosophical and theological language to describe the indescribable—two becoming one through their love. Finally, at the end of the anthem we are introduced to an allegorical figure called Reason who is the author of the third and last part of the poem, the “Threnos.” In this beautiful poem, many readers find the last part, written with extreme economy in tercets, the most beautiful.

Content : It is an allegorical poem about the death of ideal love. It’s an allegory about love. It describes a funeral arranged for a Phoenix and a Turtledove, who have both died. The funeral divides the bird community: some birds are invited but others excluded. The poem concludes with a prayer for the dead lovers.